Our Stake Relief Society secretary just sent out invitations via Evite for our upcoming Stake Axillary Leadership meeting. This means she had to upload all of our personal email addresses - obtained from the secured Church website - into a third party, commercial website.

What is the Church policy about a Stake representative (or anyone who has access to LCR data) giving out this private information? I just presumed this was something that should not be done, but is there anything in the Handbooks or on a Church website somewhere prohibiting this type of behavior?

It would seem to me that the term 'MLS Data' used in Russells quoted section includes all data stored in MLS, which includes members email addresses. If the email list uploaded to Evite was compiled from MLS data, then that use violated the quoted section. If the email addresses were obtained by some other method, then it didn't violate the policy. Just my opinion.

dvester wrote:If the email list uploaded to Evite was compiled from MLS data, then that use violated the quoted section. If the email addresses were obtained by some other method, then it didn't violate the policy. Just my opinion.

I share the same opinion. I use different emails for different things, and when someone scrapes my Church email and sends it to a vendor, I am not a happy camper.

And how does she control the totally inappropriate ads that show up? Not only do I not need the alcohol advertisements that appear with the ward social announcement, but those companies then send directly to my email address that they have been given so thoughtfully.

Letter vs Spirit. The term MLS data could be taken as far Asti include name, phone number, birthdays, spouses or children, ect. Yet the LDS App allows you to copy contacts directly to your phone which then stores data to cloud and/or 3rd party vendor.

I would think that the intent of those quote policies is to discourage export MLS membership data and storing that in the cloud. Sensitive membership data would include ordinance dates, recommend status, ect. If members have provided an email address as a part of their record they have intended for that to be a method of contact.

Rather than uploading all the emails into the Evite system, you should always explore the possibility of copying and pasting a group of emails into such systems. Often you can use your contact application to generate a group email and then copy and paste the recipients into the 3rd party vendor to send the evite too.

I have a related problem. I use custom email addresses in MLS for each of my family members. We don't use these addresses for anything other than church communication. Recently each of my family members started receiving unsolicited commercial emailings to our MLS associated email addresses advertising an internet filtering service called cleanrouter.com.

Who ever provided cleanrouter.com our email addresses must have somehow scraped them from MLS.

What privacy level was set for those addresses? I think the odds are this was done by someone in your stake. The default (in the US) is for information to be available to all members of the stake. Outside of the stake, the number of people with access to those emails gets really small really fast.

Have you searched the Help Center? Try doing a Google search and adding "site:churchofjesuschrist.org/help" to the search criteria.

So we can better help you, please edit your Profile to include your general location.

Clean Router appears to be based in Arizona. If you live in Arizona, it was likely a Clean Router employee in your stake who got ahold of your email address. Latter-day Saints are a prime market for filtering services, and it's a major temptation to push marketing boundaries a bit too far when someone sees an opportunity.

If you follow any LDS-themed blogs, chances are you were bombarded with VidAngel multiple times a week for the last several months. They advertised heavily to the LDS market, ad-nauseum. The filtering market is ripe among Latter-day Saints.

Samuel Bradshaw • If you desire to serve God, you are called to the work.